Dissertation Award in Nuclear Physics Talk: Data Analysis and Present Status of the MuCap Experiment

The MuCap experiment measures the rate of muon capture on the proton from a known initial state, providing an unambiguous determination of the pseudoscalar coupling $g_{\rm P}$ of the proton's weak interaction. In 2007 the MuCap collaboration released their first physics results for $g_{\rm P}$ with 20\% precision, a statistics limited, unambiguous measurement of this coupling constant surpassing all previous efforts. Since that first data collection, several improvements to the experiment were made towards the final precision goal of $g_{\rm P}$ to 7\%. In this talk, the MuCap first physics measurement will be discussed, and the status of the subsequent experimental and analysis effort will be described.